Sunday, January 1, 2012

Happy New Year

Happy New Year! It's been an eventful year out here, as usual, but I'm not going to recap, since you can just scroll down the page and do that anyway. I was planning on starting out the year with a snorkel trip, but it was a bit too windy and a little gray today, so it was just a nice day off. We swapped out a few of the albatross counters on the plane, and Dasha's vacation time was up, so she left on the last flight, too. I hope it won't be too long before I can get back to D.C. to visit. We also got 5 new Thai employees on the island. Three of them will be helping out with the verbesina removal on Eastern Island, so it's nice to have them here. They've got their work cut out for them.

We also did a Christmas Bird Count for the Audubon Society. They do the count annually all across the mainland to get an idea of what birds are around. It's nice that some of our albatross counters took their only day off from counting albatrosses to count all of the other species of birds on the island.

About Me

After high school I went into the Navy doing nuclear power stuff on a submarine. After 6 years, I left the Navy then got my biology degree from Montana State Univ. I then worked for the USDA doing human nutrition research for 8 years. I also got my Master's Degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of North Dakota. While doing that I worked for Mr. Ellie Pooh selling elephant dung paper (google it) to help the Sri Lanka elephants. After that, I did the only logical thing with my MS and moved to Cleveland, OH and got a job in security at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was great, for a while, but I found a 1 year temporary job at Midway Atoll with the US Fish & Wildlife Service. I loved it so much that I moved to an even smaller island with only 4-15 people (Tern Island). After being the Asst Manager, then the Manager, I got the chance to go back to Midway as the Wildlife Biologist for a few more years. Just so you know, I didn't write this as an employee, I just commented about my days here and put up some photos, so these aren't the views of the FWS. I still do ocean work for the FWS, but I do it from the Headquarters office in the Washington D.C. area.